The Gnomon
by XxChan-ChanxX
Summary: Mwuhahaha! Welcome Boy's and Girls to a story that might make you leap to your doom. but this time its part of the Sonic cast that's leaping to their doom! But here's the catch! Can you guess which one of the Sonic cast is a Ghost before reading this fi? **This story was made when I was 12 years old, don't expect anything good out of it.
1. Chapter 1

_a/n: Yes you guys I was inspired by another story to write this horror story. So enjoy! _

**Disclaimer: I do not own any of the Sonic crew or cast and the story belongs to Jan Mark.**

**The Gnomon**

Handsome Sonic T. Hedgehog strolled through the hall of Golden Wheel Guest House and chanced on a mirror that hung near the reception desk.

"Sonic loves mirrors," his sister Sonia had once said. "He can look at them for hours." He permitted himself a sidelong glance in passing, but halted when he heard his mother chatting in the coffee lounge with Mrs. Rabbit, the proprietor. They were apparently discussing Sonic.

"Honestly," said Mrs. Hedgehog, "you'd never think he was nearly sixteen."

Sonic and his reflection nodded to each other in tacit agreement. They could easily pass for eighteen, and often did.

"Sometimes he behaves like a five-year-old." Sonic scowled and moved closer to the door of the coffee lounge, the better to hear Mrs. Rabbit reply. Mrs. Rabbit, schooled by years of discreet hospitality, spoke always with restraint, but it was Mrs. Bat, a fellow guest, who answered his mother. Mrs. Bat communicated through a built-in loud hailer. "I'd never have suggested it. If I'd thought he'd mind," Mrs. Bat yelled, elegantly.

"Just one afternoon he's been asked to give up, out of his entire holiday, and he's been sulking since breakfast," said Mrs. Hedgehog. "Still, he's not going to upset poor Rouge; I'll see to that."

Sonic's afternoon, which had been scheduled to include a naughty film at the ABC in town on the strength of his easily passing for eighteen, was to be sacrificed in the interests of lolloping Rouge Bat from Leighton Buzzard who wanted to explore certain atmospheric ruins, a squalid pile of hard core on a nearby hillside, and dignified as an ancient monument solely by the presence of a plaque erected by the Department of the Environment. Sonic's services as escort and guide had been rashly offered, and lacking his permission, by his mother who, without sharing it, liked to boast about his knowledge of archaeology. Both Hedgehogs and Bats had arrived at the Golden Wheel on the same day, but by adroit programming Sonic had avoided meeting Rouge after the first confrontation at dinner on the evening of their arrival. This unfortunate introduction during which, after a day spent traveling, neither of the parties was at their best, had sealed Rouge's fate as far as Sonic was concerned.

"I love old places like this," Rouge had said, gesturing at the low ceilings and murky nooks of the Golden Wheel's dining room. "I think this place is really spooky, don't? Don't you?" Sonic remained silent and savaged his rhubarb crumble. "Don't you think it's spooky?"

"Not particularly," Sonic said. He detested words like spooky, eerie, spine-chilling; also weird, incorrectly used. "Just decrepit," he said flatly.

"But doesn't it make you feel weird?" Rouge persisted. "I felt something, the moment I came in."

"I bet you did," Sonic mouthed, under the pretense of chewing rhubarb crumble.

"They've got a ghost," Sonia chipped in. "I asked."

"I know. It's really weird how you can tell, isn't it?" Rouge said.

"Mrs. Rabbit said it was a girl who crept out one day to meet her lover and he never turned up. Mrs. Rabbit said she's still waiting."

"Has she seen her?"

"Nobody's seen her," Rouge breathed. Crumbs flew.

"Apparently you just sort of feel her, sort of waiting."

"_Weird."_

"And you can smell roses. She was carrying roses."

"Has Mrs. Rabbit ever smelled roses?"

"Yes. You can sometimes smell them even in winter. She said, if you ever smell roses, you'll know Amy's about--that was her name, this ghost; Amy Rose."

**Channing: So do you guy's and girls want me to continue this story? Review your answer!!**


	2. Chapter 2

"You'd have a job not to smell roses at this time of year," Sonic observed, looking out the window at the July sun, low in the sky and flooding with rich color the rose garden that lay beyond the windows.

"If I smell roses I shall _faint_," Rouge remarked, allowing the skin in the jug of custard to flop like a flexible Frisbee over her second helping if rhubarb crumble.

"It's really eerie, isn't it?" Sonia said. "A ghost you can only smell. What happened to her, this Amy? Did she die of a broken heart, or something?"

"Oh no, I asked Mrs. Rabbit. She said there was an accident. She had a fall, or something, while she was waiting, and when they found her it was too late to do anything, and she died."

"A fall? Out of a window?"

" I expect so. She'd be leaning out to look for him, wouldn't she? I wonder which one it was?" Rouge looked round speculatively at the dinning room windows, and sniffed.

"I bet if we found it we should be able to feel something," Sonia said.

Rouge shuddered pleasurably. "Let's try. I've never seen a ghost, but I often _feel_ thing's."

It was in order to commune with the past that Rouge wished to explore the ruins that afternoon, in Sonic's company. Rouge would feel less weird in Sonic's company, according to Sonic's mother. "I thought feeling weird was the object of the exercise," said Sonic, but to no avail. He put his head round the door of the coffee lounge and flashed a hideous smile across his face, like a neon advertisement in Piccadilly Circus.

"Where are you off to?" Mrs. Hedgehog asked, with base suspicion.

"To wait for Rouge," Sonic said, affronted. Did she really think he was such a fool as to sneak off to the cinema? " I'll be in the rose garden--will you tell her when she comes down?"

He was not lying. He fully intended to wait for Rouge in the rose garden but, so far as he knew neither Rouge nor his mother was aware that at the Golden Wheel there were two rose gardens; the one at the back, beyond the dining room, and the other one. Sonic was going to wait in the other one.

He had discovered the second garden by accident while evading, as it happened, an earlier encounter with spooky Rouge and her chilly spine. The official rose garden was broad and spacious with standard trees in circular beds, a blanched statue or two, and little white iron tables and chairs disposed here and there on the clipped turf. It reminded him of a crematorium. Along one side was a low rockery hedged with conifers that had their tops nipped off in adolescence. Resolutely squaring their shoulders they now formed an impenetrable windbreak. "They're pleached," said Mrs. Bat, and with her daughter's vampire ability to fasten onto a harmless word and bleed it white, she repeated it at the intervals, liking the sound of it.

"Pleached." It described her voice very accurately, Sonic thought.

He could hear her pleaching now as he slipped away from the lawn beyond the dining room windows, and sidled between the cypress boughs of the conifer hedge, into the other rose garden.

He guessed that before the conifers were planted and the rockery raised, it had been an extension of the main garden, but now the windbreak obscured it entirely. Sonic, who had originally squeezed between the trees in an effort at hasty concealment, had been amazed to find himself in an open space instead of being, as he had expected, compressed between the conifers and a wall. Today he muttered, "Open, sesame," and passed straight through to stand at the head of the second rose garden. Unlike the public part, it seemed to exist for the sole purpose of growing roses.


	3. Chapter 3

It was narrow. Heavy banks of pink blossoms, one could scarcely call them mere flowers, overhung a trellis on either side, and shaded lush grass that had been cut, but not recently. Yellow ramblers rambled; cream climbers rioted. At the far end was a wooden rustic seat, weathered to the shade of old pewter, and at the nearer close to where he stood, was the only other furniture, a sundial. Sonic had expected to find an inscription on its bronze plate, _Tempus fugit _perhaps, and there was one, but not _Tempus fugit. Time and the hour run through the roughest day,_ it said in Roman letters that encircled the Roman numerals. Sonic, recognizing the quotation, took it to mean that everything must come to an end if you wait long enough. The gnomon pointed at his back as he walked down the garden to the rustic seat.

"Come into the garden Amy," said Sonic, the scent of roses clogging his flared nostrils, and suddenly suspected that it was here, and not in the house, that Miss Rose had come to her tryst. He waited for the sensation that ought to chill his spine as it certainly would have chilled Rouge's. If Rouge were there, would Amy Rose manifest herself as she waited for her faithless lover who was now, according to Sonia's researches, one hundred and twelve years overdue? He imagined her standing by the rustic seat, tall, stately, leaning several degrees from the perpendicular and counterbalanced by a bustle, like an old joke in _Punch_. She would be no joke if he did see her, but no one ever had seen her. They only smelled roses. Sonic sat down on the rustic seat, propped his feet on the farther arm and settled back to read and yawn. Distantly, mercifully diminished by distance, Mrs. Bat pleached on. From time to time the telephone rang in the reception hall, but in the rose garden, regardless of the sundial's admonition, time hung suspended. The roses, ripe for disintegration, nevertheless remained whole. Not a petal fell to the ground. Beyond the hedge a strident shriek, fit to chill the hardiest spine, split the gentle air.

"Soooooooonic!"

He looked down discouragingly at his book.

"_Sooooonic!" _The voice advanced, receded, advanced again. Sonic, rather than look at the hedge in case Rouge felt his penetrating gaze and discovered him, fastened his eyes upon the nearest rose, a swollen globe of lingerie pink, like something off a chorus girl's garter. He stared at it.

"Soniic!"

Over-examined, the rose blurred and softened before his eyes, but when he refocused it was still there, and the voice, a little subdued, receded disconsolately towards the house. "Sonny?" Sonic's left forefinger reached out and tipped the rose under the chin, but even now, on the point of dissolution, it remained on its stem.

"Sonic?" it was his mother's voice, sharpened by anger to Mrs. Bat's pitched, and like a harpy echo Mrs. Bat joined in. "Sonic?"

"I'm not here dear," Sonic murmured. He heard their conversation in angular duet, his mother embarrassed and apologetic, Mrs. Bat making light of things, but maternal, affronted on Rouge's behalf. She and Mrs. Hedgehog were already on Pat and Shirley terms.

"Oh Shirley, I'm _so_ sorry. I can't think…."

"It's not _your_ fault, Pat."

The telephone rang again. Sonic glance up and saw the rose's soft sphere glowing at the very edge of his eyesight. When he reached the end of the chapter he would allow himself the pleasure of beheading the foolish, nodding flower if it did not fall before he was ready for it.

Mrs. Bat pleached unexpectedly close to the conifer hedge. Sonic's eyes were drawn unwillingly toward it, twin lasers drilling into the back of her crimped head through the dense branches (Go away, you old bat. Hop off.) and saw, near the sundial, a rose explode silently in a shower on pink petals. Sonic stared and absorbed what he had seen. It appeared that the rose had not so much dropped as _burst._ A little closer, the same thing happened again; a second rose vanished and this time petals did not fall down, but flew up, as if a hand had clouted the rose from below. Sonic closed his own itching forefinger against his palm and saw a third rose evaporate.


End file.
